


Change of Honours

by Gileonnen



Category: Coriolanus - Shakespeare
Genre: AU: Reversed Allegiances, Half-Naked Volumnia, Light Sexual Violence, M/M, Sieges and Stratagems, Toga Candida
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:06:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caius Martius sets Rome aflame--as his mother urges him on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Change of Honours

After the first hour in Corioli, he has ceased to mark the time; he has ceased to curse the soldiers who had abandoned him to the mercy of the Volscians, and nearly ceased screaming for Mars to strike down his traitor men. His body burns, each laceration alight with pain.

Every man wears his enemy's face. He cuts each one down as though he is the Volscian general, and none of these deaths contents him--when the Roman soldiers spill into Corioli at last, their armour glittering in the fading sunlight like a golden wave, the last Volscian has fallen.

Cominius finds him at the house of Gaius Aemilius, a kindly old man whose Latin is good and whose hands are skilled at tying bandages. "You'll be repaid for your loyalty," they promise him, although it is the man's disloyalty that merits their reward.

He can smile at the irony of it, at least, although he knows to hold his tongue.

"Did you see him? Did you see the Volscian?" he asks, but Cominius only shakes his head. He is caked over with such a quantity of dust and blood that his skin appears black in the failing light of evening.

He and Cominius smear the blood from one another's cheeks with a rough cloth, sharing watered wine and watching the stars pick out the shapes of heroes in the sky. As Cominius dozes off on his shoulder, he wonders that he is still wide awake; perhaps it is only the burn of his wounds, but he thinks that it is the knowledge of the Volscian general waiting somewhere beyond their campfires.

Perhaps they will find themselves among those distant stars one day, still locked in combat, neither man besting the other. The thought is a strangely comforting one.

Upon his return to Rome, matrons strew flowers in his path, and the soldiers call him Tullus Aufidius Coriolanus.

*

"We're determined that you should stand for consul," says Cominius, sliding his fingers through Aufidius's hair with an incredible delicacy. It is a delicacy unsuited to a soldier, thinks Aufidius, but it is well-suited to the politician that Cominius plays in Rome. "Will you do it? Put on the candidate's toga and beg the plebeians' voices?"

"It's the tribunes' voices I'll need," Aufidius answers. "Brutus sees kings everywhere he goes; it's swelled his head, overthrowing the Tarquins. He'll say that I'm proud."

"You are proud," laughs Cominius, and he presses Aufidius to the mattress to kiss him. "But you know better than to show it. You're the hero of Corioli; you can do no wrong."

"Then I'll stand," says Aufidius, and he manages to roll Cominius off of the mattress and onto his back. The older man winces as the impact knocks his breath from him, then pushes Aufidius away with one hand as he clutches his chest with the other.

"Get better at lying down before you--before you think of standing," says Cominius, but he's laughing as he says it.

*

Tullus Aufidius Coriolanus is named consul by the plebeians' joyous acclaim; Brutus mutters darkly of their new consul's ambition, but Sicinius quiets him. "Without Coriolanus to lead our army, we'll never push back the Volscian head," he says, to which Brutus concedes at last.

They needn't say--indeed, no one need say--that the Volscian Caius Martius is no better than a madman, and no less terrible than a god.

*

Before the walls of Rome rides Volumnia, a fearsome Volscian matron with her head helmeted in gold and her withered breasts bare. She holds a team of two white stallions, who shriek at the sky as they draw her chariot this way and that. "Surrender, Rome!" she cries. "Surrender, or the Volsces will cut down your women and children before your eyes!"

She is as fierce as Camilla, that legendary Volscian warrior-princess; she is, Aufidius knows all too well, at least thrice as canny. Aufidius longs for a bow with which to strike her down.

"Where is her son?" Cominius asks. "It's not his way to hang back from the scene of battle."

"He hung back at Corioli, as well," Aufidius says. "His mother keeps him back--it's plain that she has some strategem in mind."

They watch the stern woman shaking her javelin at the might of Rome, and they try to divine her mind.

It strikes Aufidius then that such a woman would let Corioli fall, would sacrifice a city and all who defended it, if the atrocity of their destruction sufficed to stir the Volscians into a frenzy. Such a woman would impale her own son's head on a post to rally soldiers around it.

"Rome!" screams Volumnia, like a curse, and she hurls her javelin with unnatural force so that the haft sings through the air. Even with her great strength, though, it cannot cross the distance between them, and her weapon shatters against the lowest portion of Rome's wall.

If she meant to see them flinch, she departs disappointed.

*

Rome's gates part to release legion after legion, with Titus Lartius, Cominius, and Coriolanus at their head. "Let us fall like a great axe upon their throats," Cominius proclaims, and his voice carries across the ground between the Roman and Volscian armies.

"Let them burn like meat," shouts Volumnia; "Let us paint our faces with their blood," calls Caius Martius.

He is glorious in the sunlight, his naked sword mirror-bright--he is a head taller than the men around him, even before he claps on his helmet and calls for the charge. The Volscians echo him with one voice, shouting his name: _Martius, Martius,_ they cry, as though they are praising the god.

He could be Mars; he is as golden and perfect and deadly.

Aufidius spurs his horse, and the Roman forces follow him in a long arc like the talon of a great eagle--the two armies smash into one another with the force of a hammer.

His horse is cut from beneath him within the first minutes of fighting, going down with a spear in its heart; he narrowly keeps from falling beneath it, wrenching his leg from beneath the bulk of the beast as the Volscians come at him in a swarm. _Fall, fall, you bastard Volsces--_ he lays about him with his blade, bulling through the ranked infantry with his shield before him, shedding Volscians to either side.

Before him is Martius, and he will not be deterred; he will not be kept back from the man whose death is his destiny. "Martius!" cries Aufidius--they reach one another, fighting through their own men to clash, and the press of soldiers before and behind brings them close as lovers. Martius bashes his shield against Aufidius's chest, and he loses his sword in the struggle that follows. They grapple hand to hand and hand to throat and it's the nearest thing that Aufidius knows to divinity--

Aufidius never discovers who clubs him to unconsciousness.

*

He wakes in the middle of the night with every muscle throbbing and his head pounding. He is bound to a stake, resting on his knees with his arms behind him. "The consul is awake," says a voice, and he looks up just as Volumnia kneels before him.

Even at a distance, she had looked old; from a handspan away, she is ancient, her face lined like driftwood and her eyes deeply sunken in her head. "They call you Coriolanus," she says, without preamble. "The hero of Corioli."

"The only hero of Corioli," he answers, raising his chin.

She strikes him across the face, laughing. "Do you know why we've left you alive, Tullus Aufidius Coriolanus?" asks Volumnia. "Do you know why you're here?"

"Because someone struck the back of my head," snaps Aufidius. "Was it you?"

"You're here because I want you to watch Rome burn," says Volumnia, as though he hadn't spoken. "Even now, the Aurunci and the Hernici are pouring in from all sides; we'll drag the walls down and murder the Romans in the streets."

"I'll help you," says Aufidius, before he can think to answer differently.

" _Help_ us?" Volumnia cocks her head to one side, and her eyes are bright as a bird's where the torchlight catches on them. When he meets her gaze, she laughs, getting to her feet and shouting, "The enemy of the Volsces says that he will _help_ us!"

"My men abandoned me in Corioli," Aufidius answers. He aches like the dying, but he struggles to keep his voice level. "I have no love for the soldiers of Rome--your son is the only man in the world whose honour I trust. Your son is the only man in the world whom I care to serve."

He lets himself forget Cominius, and the tribunes, and the people of Rome.

"I believe him," says a familiar voice, and then Aufidius feels his bonds cut. His shoulders protest at even the slightest twitch of his arms.

Martius touches his cheek and lifts his chin. He smiles down at Aufidius as though he is welcoming a brother home. "This Roman is an honorable man," he says, "and a lion that I'm proud to hunt. He will be welcome at my table and in my tent--I would trust him in my very bed."

Volumnia frowns, but at last she shrugs. "Be it so," she says, "And pray you're not wrong."

*

Before the walls of Rome, the remains of the Roman forces parade. They have buried their dead in the drought-parched earth around the city, and now their marching raises the dust that has been stirred by these hasty funerals.

When they began marching, their armour glittered under the sun, but now they are grimed dull.

Aufidius has put off his Roman armour to dress himself in Volscian. They wait for the Aurunci to arrive with more than anticipation, and all along the Volscian lines scuffles break out among the men. Strangers spit upon Aufidius and bare their swords at him, but he shares Martius's table and his tent, his drills and his scuffles and his command; at night, they share a bed.

Martius's servants snigger that the Roman consul has become a Volscian's mistress, but Martius thrashes them for their presumption.

"Am I not your mistress?" asks Aufidius, when they share a pallet that evening. The first scouts of the Aurunci have arrived, promising that their forces are near at hand, and Volumnia has declared that at noon the Volscian forces will strike their final blow against Rome.

Any other man might offer reassurance, denials, a laughing confirmation--Martius, though, only cuffs Aufidius as roughly as though he expects to be hit in response. Aufidius catches him by the throat and presses him to the pallet, and Martius is _laughing_ as he drives his fist into Aufidius's temple--they snarl and bite and bruise and laugh like boys, and when Aufidius slides his thigh between Martius's legs it's nearly as good as the brawling.

They rest easily together when they have exhausted themselves; while Martius sleeps, Coriolanus touches each bruise and bite to make it ache.

*

Within a week, Rome is burning.

Aufidius knows that he should feel some sort of grief for his fatherland, and yet he cannot bring himself to weep as he passes the smoking husks of insulae. The _patria_ burns, and Aufidius steps over the corpse of Junius Brutus without a trace of guilt.

He has not yet found Cominius, and for that, at least, he is grateful.

In the building that once housed the senate, with the Volscians gathered around, Volumnia declares her son Caius Martius Romanus.


End file.
